[mirimir]

Right, but who? LBJ and southern conservatives? The Mafia? Castro? And why use a shooter with such obvious Soviet connections?

My best guess is southern conservatives who, among other things, hated him for backing down over Bay of Pigs. So they manipulated Oswald into doing it, as a false flag.

And yeah, maybe that's too obvious. Maybe that's the false flag for something far more subtle.

[lordgrenville]

In Caro's monumental, unfinished biography of LBJ, he basically says that he found no evidence to link him to the assassination, having done decades of incredibly thorough research. But he also describes Johnson as:

- insanely ambitious, and obsessed with becoming President

- devastated at ending up VP, which basically ruled him out from the top job (barring JFK's death)

- insanely secretive (for example, he tracked down and destroyed almost all copies of his college yearbook, which merely showed him as being somewhat disliked/seen as dishonest)

Bearing all of which in mind, I'm partial to this particular conspiracy theory. Though I fully expect that if it's true we'll never know. Johnson was probably unmatched when it comes to pulling off something this audacious and eliminating all evidence.

[AndrewBissell]

"JFK and the Unspeakable" suggests that JFK had signaled his intentions to scale down the Cold War, withdraw from Vietnam, and reign in or disband the CIA after the Bay of Pigs disaster, and was killed by rogue elements in the CIA, probably in concert with military-industrial business interests and organized crime organizations who didn't like the Kennedys shining a light on their own misdeeds either.

There's a reference to this in Scorcese's recent movie "The Irishman": "if they can get a president, they can get a president of a union."